The Linked dashboard begins a user on the journey to finding drawings and documents for a construction project.
— Howard Lipin

Terriann Nohilly, 24, only three years out of college at UC San Diego, has upturned the construction industry with a new software invention with only an $80 investment.

Developed for her employer Turner Construction, "Linked" ties together mountains of blueprints, memos and other data into a web-based, visually oriented file box that helps field superintendents and subcontractors manage construction sites with a minimum of confusion.

"The construction process is far from perfect," said Nohilly, a native of Riverside who majored in chemical engineering. "As we move the construction industry into the 20th, let alone the 21st century, what has been really tremendous is getting people the correct information with obviously relative ease ... in a timely way."

Nohilly, who originally wanted to be environmental engineer, interned with Turner during college and became a fulltime employee in 2010 as a procurement engineer at the billion-dollar Lindbergh Field expansion project.

Along the way, she won Irish dancing contests, ran half-marathons, helped build Habitat for Humanity houses and lately joined Toastmasters to hone her public speaking skills.

On the job, Nohilly soon realized that the construction document software for staff and contractors was so difficult to navigate that most couldn't use it. They were trying to make sense of Microsoft's SharePoint document sharing program and Bluebeam Revu's system of posting PDFs of construction drawings.

"It was very underutilized," Nohilly said.

And when the iPad came out in 2010, she advised her bosses that tablets were the wave of the future and could she help prepare the company for using mobile devices. They gave her $1,000 for an Asus tablet (she's a PC, not an Apple aficionado).

So she and an intern from Germany, Daniel Kettler, used an $80 PowerPoint program to convert document links to HTML, the computer code language for the web.

They created a dashboard with icons that lead users to drawings, documents, videos and other information, after using white boards to sketch out path a user might follow to track down a key item.

In a six-week period last year, they beta-tested their workaround with a half-dozen Turner employees and contractors and on Aug. 28, 2011, they went live with the program.

Now, 200-300 people at the Lindbergh project site, including at the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, are using Linked on their tablets, laptops and desktops -- all without a manual or the need for an intensive training session.

Then Nohilly spoke to a Turner audience in San Francisco and two Bluebeam user conferences in Los Angeles and Seattle, all culminating in a $10,000 Turner innovation award, announced at the end of September.

The program is detailed on a website, turnerlinked.com, created specifically for the innovation award entry form, where employees and contractors extoll Linked's virtues.

"I think it's a necessity for Turner just to incorporate this into their standard program around the country," Dan McGuck, Turner's project executive at Lindbergh, says on the video.